Cloudflare blocks another largest recorded DDoS attack – this time, peaking at 11.5 Tbps

• DDoS attacks are growing more destructive
• Cloudflare mitigated another record-breaking one
• The traffic came from a combination of several IoT and cloud providers

Internet infrastructure provider and global cloud platform, Cloudflare, recently prevented a record-breaking Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack from causing any damage.

In a short announcement published on X, Cloudflare said its defenses “have been working overtime” over the past few weeks, autonomously blocking “hundreds of hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks^[1].” Among them was an attack that reached peaks of 5.1 Bpps and 11.5 Tbps.

Bpps (Billions of Packets per Second) measures the rate of packets sent to the target and indicates how fast the attacker is overwhelming network devices. Tbps (Terabits per Second) on the other hand measures the total volume of data being sent and indicates how much bandwidth the attack consumes.

In the original tweet, Cloudflare said the attack was a UDP flood that “mainly came from Google Cloud”, but later corrected itself, saying it actually came from a combination of several IoT and cloud providers. “While Google Cloud was one source, it was not the majority.”

Breaking records

This DDoS attack, whoever launched it, broke records for both metrics tracked. The biggest DDoS attack before it was also record-breaking, and was also mitigated by Cloudflare. It was 7.3 Tbps heavy, and targeted an unnamed hosting provider.

Distributed Denial of Service attacks occur when a threat actor compromises thousands of internet-connected devices with malware, and gains the ability to use them. They then send pings to the target server, overwhelming it with traffic and ultimately denying access to the actual users.

With the rising popularity of the Internet of Things (IoT), and the number of internet-connected devices growing exponentially by the day, DDoS attacks have been growing in size, complexity, and destructive power.

Many threat actors offer DDoS as a service, giving other criminals the option to run their own attacks for roughly $20 per hour.

Via BleepingComputer^[2]

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